Artful Scribe is a fantastic organisation, a not-for-profit writer development agency supporting emerging writers, and this weekend I had the pleasure of going along to their Young Writers groups at Poole Lighthouse to help hand out the prizes for their Young Writers competition.

A few weeks ago I was invited to be part of the judging panel, which required me to read short pieces (up to 500 words) from writers in three different age groups: 7-10s, 11-14s and 15-18s. The standard was staggeringly high, and there were plenty of entries in each age group who arguably deserved first place. In the end, our judging panel of four (Rohan and Yasmin from Artful Scribe, plus two outsiders – myself and Georgie Codd) happily found ourselves in broad agreement as we picked the winners. I’d never had the opportunity to be part of a process like this before, and I was relieved that it didn’t descend into heated arguments and people fiercely fighting the corner for their respective favourites.

Across all the age groups, I was struck by the maturity of the writing, and the maturity of thought behind many of the pieces. My personal favourite was an acrostic poem about time, with each stanza using lines starting with t, i, m, and e. Not a single line felt forced or false, and each stanza developed what the poet had to say on the subject, with some profound musings on the nature of existence that many adult writers might struggle to encapsulate. I was hugely impressed.

I started writing fiction relatively late in life, as I’ve said elsewhere. What held me back when I was younger was a sense that I didn’t know what I wanted to say. As I told the young writers on Saturday, I wish that when I was their age someone had told me not to worry about that, just to tell stories. What a writer has to say comes out when they tell stories, whether they mean it to or not, and it’s certainly the case with all of my books so far that the themes and meaning of the stories have been found along the way, rather than something that was planned from the very start. It’s so good to know that organisations like Artful Scribe exist and that the next generation of writers are being so effectively supported and encouraged.

 

Image credit: Photo by Negative Space on Stock Snap